Thursday in Lent 1: Exalted in unapproachable Holiness

Opening Sentence

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us, but if we confess our sins, God, who is faithful and just, will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 1 John 1:8, 9

Commemoration: David (Dewi) of Wales

Almighty God, who called your servant David to be a faithful and wise steward of your mysteries for the people of Wales: Mercifully grant that, following his purity of life and zeal for the gospel of Christ, we may with him receive the crown of everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and ever. Amen.

Psalter: Psalm 50

Lessons: Genesis 39, 1 Corinthians 2:14-3:15, Mark 2:1-12

In thinking of God, as Christians have learned to believe in God, the mind is always free; it is the finite before the Infinite, but its freedom proves its kinship. We are God's children, and cannot fully understand God, but God is our Father, and we know God enough to love God. As we love God we learn, for God's sake and in God's power, to love others. So loving, we become partakers of the Divine Nature, sharers in that divine activity whereby God is God.

Thus nothing falls outside the circle of the Divine Love. The structure of Reality is the articulate expression of Divine Love. God loves; God answers with love; and the love wherewith God loves and answers is God: Three Persons, One God.

God is Love. But we miss the full wonder and glory of that supreme revelation if we let the term Love, as we naturally understand it, supply the whole meaning of the term God. There is a great danger lest we forget the Majesty of God, and so think of God's love as a mere amiability. We must first realize God as exalted in unapproachable Holiness, so that our only fitting attitude before God is one of abject self-abasement, if we are to feel the stupendous marvel of the Love which led God, so high and lifted up, to take a place beside us in our insignificance and squalor that we might be united with God's self. "When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have set in place; what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?"

To omit the thought of God's majesty, and to rebel at language of self-abasement in God's presence, is not only to cut at the historic and psychological root of all human religion, but it defeats its own object, for it belittles the Love which it seeks to enhance. If our first thought of God is that God always has a welcome for us, there is less thrill of wonder in that welcome than if we first remember God's Eternity and Holiness, and then pass to the confident conviction, which remains a mystery commanding silent awe -- "our fellowship is with the Father."

But no; it does not merely remain such a mystery; this is itself the climax of mystery, which we apprehend (if at all) in an agony of joy and a rapture of fear. For the joy is shot through with the sense of our unworthiness, the rapture intensifies the fear that is our response to overwhelming greatness. So it is only half the truth to say that we must worship the Transcendent in order to appreciate the Immanent. God is never so transcendent as when God is most immanent. It was in the consciousness that he came from God and went to God that our Lord performed the act of menial service. It was when he acknowledged his earthly Name that the very soldiers went backward and fell to the ground. Now is there any more august and awe-inspiring symbol of the supremacy of the Most High than the sublime and dreadful solitude of the figure on the Cross -- a spiritual loneliness made more intense by the physical proximity of dying malefactors and mocking crowds, for whom in his agony he prayed.

"This is the true God and eternal life."

William Temple

Christus Veritas

I Stand Amazed in the Presence